Flapping, unleashing the winds of change
like the curvature of raven wings,
like a heartbeat, a drumbeat:
This is celebration
what it would mean to intone
a new vocabulary called reparations
to a soul-rifted nation.
There are things that can be reset, resewn, repaired—
a broken bone, ripped sleeve, cracked fender.
But what of the ones left to die
in streets or prisons?
What of broken beginnings, unholy crossings,
the right to the soil?
Counting, recounting, accounting
leaves a white silence
of what might have been.
40 acres and a mule.
This is celebration
what it would mean to intone a new vocabulary
called atonement to a tone-deaf nation.
Unpaid, the past sweeping into the air
like choirs of birds or angels.
If paid, what price to sing again a new freedom?
How to count the past:
250 years of slavery
90 years of Jim Crow
60 years of separate but equal.
Could we exhume the past from the past:
land seizures, redlining, cheap labor–
uncover the roots, chart a new course?
Repairing a heart or an ocean
is like sailing in reverse
like letting the heart beat its steady drum.
This is celebration,
the heartbeat, the drumbeat,
the wing-flap
what it would mean
to intone a new vocabulary
called reckoning to the wreck of
lives not just bodies
to take back the right to the soil
airing secrets that have enslaved
us all to a debt
to a hushed biography of consequences
a balance accruing:
40 acres and a mule
a heartbeat, a drumbeat
tapping the collective memory.
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Sandra Fees has chapbooks published by Five Oaks Press and Finishing Line Press. Her work appears in Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice, Bards Against Hunger, The Aurorean, and The Comstock Review (forthcoming). She is Berks County’s Seventh Poet Laureate (Reading, Pennsylvania, 2016-18).
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